Corinne

Corinne is the English and French form of Corinna, a Latin name borrowed from the Greek Κοριννα (Korinna) from “Korē” meaning “girl, maiden”. The original Greek name had been borne by an ancient Greek poetess who wrote some time in the centuries before Christ (c. 5th century B.C.) and is believed to have been a contemporary of the great Greek poet Pindar (she may have even been his teacher). Korinna was considered one of the nine Mortal Muses in ancient Greece and is one of the oldest known female authors. Later in the first centuries B.C. and A.D. the Roman poet Ovid used the name Corinna as the object of his ultimately unattainable desires in his book “Amores” (published over 2,000 years ago!). Again, centuries after Ovid, an English poet, Robert Herrick, used this name when he wrote “Corinna’s Going A-Maying” in 1634; a famous poem about a young girl who is urged to seize the beautiful spring day. Adding even more literary cachet to this name was an early 19th century French-Swiss novelist Madame de Staël who published her most celebrated work “Corinne, or Italy” in 1807. The heroine of the novel, Corinne, became an iconic model of the independent woman – artistic, beautiful, intelligent, spirited, romantic and emotionally vulnerable. Modern-day usage of the name Corinne owes most of her popularity to the influence of de Staël’s character on her early 19th century readers (who quickly embraced the name for their daughters). While no longer as popular today in the 21st century, the name Corinne was quite stylish in the 1800s.